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Commentary: Round 17

[ Congratulations to the new World Scrabble® Champion, Adam Logan (CAN), and the runner-up Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA). ]

Go to: Registration, Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 16, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20, Round 21, Round 22, Round 23, Round 24.

Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA) beat Akshay Bhandarkar (IND) by ten points, with only four seconds left on his clock, says Kristen.

I don't have much else to say this round, as my ISP helpfully switched the DNS for wscgames.com to a bad numeric address in response to my complaint about slow response time. The result was certainly successful by some measure, as the 404 messages that popped up for any page request were pretty instantaneous.

The day ends with four players neck and neck at 13-4: Adam Logan (CAN), Naween Fernando (AUS), Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (THA) and Peter Armstrong (USA). They'll be paired in the morning with the top two 12-5's: Phil Appleby (Eng) and Akshay Bhandarkar (IND).

I expect based on past tournament simulations that the pairing algorithm will initiate repeat pairings in Round 19, though it's remotely possible with the recent turnover around ranks 5-15 that they might be delayed until Round 20.

I'll remind pairings aficionados that I'm following US NSC precedent in capping contenders for pairings purposes to four times the number of rounds remaining. This means for instance that although 94 players remain in theoretical contention for second place, tsh checks only to see how many repeats are necessary to pair the top 4 * 7 = 28 players (with apologies to David Eldar (AUS) at #29). It turns out that all 28 could be paired together with no repeats, and so the program chooses the highest (closest to #1) split into two subgroups that can be paired with no repeats, which in this case is the top six and the remaining 22.